Age-related differences in talker segregation and selection: Contributions of attention to voice features

Abstract

Focused attention on expected voice features, such as F0 and spectral envelope, may facilitate segregation and selection of a target talker in competing talker backgrounds. Age-related declines in attention may limit these abilities in older adults, resulting in poorer speech understanding in complex environments. To test this hypothesis, younger and older adults with normal hearing listened to sentences with a single competing talker. For a majority of trials, listener attention was directed to the target by a cue phrase that matched the target talker’s F0 and spectral envelope; on these trials, younger adults out-performed older adults. On the remaining “probe” trials, the target’s voice unexpectedly differed from the cue phrase in terms of F0 and spectral envelope; performance declined for both groups, and younger and older adults performed similarly. Thus, older adults performed poorer than younger adults only when attention could be focused on an expected voice. Moreover, older adults responded more frequently than younger adults with words from the competing sentence rather than the target sentence. Taken together, these results support the hypothesis that declines in the ability to focus attention on expected voice features contribute to speech understanding difficulties of older adults in complex environments. [Work supported by NIH/NIDCD.]